Great Moments in Western Civilization Cooperative

Postal Constituent

The Great Moments in Western Civilization Postal Constituent is a bi-monthly comic periodical that folklorizes historic failures and grim futures. The Cooperative has published the Postal Constituent since 2009 and has published over 60 issues. Some of the earlier issues have been collected into the books: In The Beginning: Comics from the First Five Years and The Index: Part 1. Others will remain ephemeral pamphlets for eternity.

How to Fly in America

How to Fly in America collects artifacts from a not so distant past when millionaires wore money bags and poor people were two inches tall. It highlights the hysteria that led Rockefella to snuff out tenement campfires. It recounts how the Van Stelton brothers stole potatoes from hungry mouths to feed their train engines. Most importantly, it investigates that up-from-your-bootstraps- find-your-fortune-in-the-potato-pile energy that taught America how to fly.

This exhibit was part of Amid/In Western New York at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, January 2016.

Burning Rivers

Burning Rivers is a tale of American industry, ingenuity and negligence along the Great Lakes. Read about how the Cuyahoga, Chicago, Rouge and Buffalo Rivers burned and the great lengths humans went to to clean them up.

Smokestack Children

Benjamin Rathbun Builds Buffalo

Emergency Shanties

Emergency Shanties designed from things on hand for a post-apocalyptic future. Gouache on Paper, 2016

Comics Published Elsewhere

R. R. Whitehead

R.R. Whitehead tells the story of Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, the founder of the utopian arts and crafts colony Byrdcliffe, built in Woodstock, NY. Like most of the Great Moments in Western Civilization Cooperative's Postal Constituent Comics this story began in fact and was stretched for the sake of truth.

Effie Stevens

This comic also appeared in installments in Buffalo's Alt-News Weekly, The Public.

Americana

This series reflects on the great American tradition of Gilded age capitalism past and present. Gouache on paper, Summer 2017

The Museum of Failure

The Museum of Failure collects the failures of the Western Civilization into a multimedia art exhibit. The Museum originated in in Buffalo, NY but has also made appearances in Rochester and Washington, DC.